ISLA

International Securities Lending Association

With approximately 100 members, ISLA works with a number of members varying from asset managers, banks, insurance dealers, pension funds, securities dealers and service providers representing over 4,000 clients. Although they are London-based, ISLA also represents members from Europe, to the Middle-East and North America.

The Brief

Due to the number of documents that ISLA’s members need to download and share growing almost everyday, it was important for ISLA to find a new and improved way for their users to manage, view and access documentation. One of the key objectives of the site was to allow ISLA more flexibility to communicate with their members for specific areas that they cover.

This meant simplifying the navigation system and the way documents were viewed by going back to the drawing board and improve on ISLA’s previous JBi designed website.

Though the two year old website was sufficient and delivered ISLA’s requirements, the digital World continues to evolve and we are able to introduce new ideas for their members online portal. JBi were able to offer more to ISLA, exceed limitations and deliver a stronger user journey for all members on a new platform.

Overall, the exciting project consisted of designing a website fully compatible for all desktop, tablets and mobile screens; bringing designs to life by implementing interactive features and building the website with ISLA in mind to give them the option of editing content at ease.

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Approach

It was at the forefront of our minds to create a platform where users can easily search and download documentation, a place where events can be promoted and users could register with ease, a website where members and non-members are distinguished and filtered to the correct and relevant documentation.

As we deepened into the process, it was vital to imagine and walk in the shoes of how a user would experience ISLA’s website with the elements considered. By doing so, JBi were able to consider ways to simplify the navigation, think from a creative design angle of how to present the documentation and how the new website could benefit the ISLA team internally.

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A man types on an Apple Macbook Pro

Challenges

The main challenge was to discover and create a way to organise, display and provide users the ability to search through such a large array of documentation. Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to find a specific document within a mass of documents. With all the documentation present and taking into account the continuous uploads, it was particularly vital to ensure all resources were organised and manageable, particularly for a long-standing future website.

During the process, JBi gathered all thoughts and experiences from the team to come up with the perfect solution for all users – ISLA themselves and their website users.

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Outcome

Instead of multiple pages full of documents, JBi helped ISLA to simplify this to one main landing page. To simplify the search process further, categories were put in place where filtering is available to show the latest documents. From Joomla to WordPress, from heaps of documentation to organised coloured categories, from a difficult and long task of document seeking to a simple search – JBi exhausted knowledge and ideas all round to address these areas.